Poetry doesn’t prove a thing.
It disproves the authenticity of language,
the permanence of meaning and the
universality of reason. Suddenly,

I thought, on the couch, while
reading a history of Christianity. Christ!
what if that’s true. Dispensing order
the poet returns to a formulation
of disorder, a verbal approximation to
natural chaos. I thought,

while sinking in the couch. Silly
ruminations, I often say. But not
this time. I think I was on to some-
thing. Poetry as the last human act,
a summary of lived, thought, felt
experience, an attempt to crystallize
our plight in an image of poetic flight. I

thought, while slouching and setting
the book on the table. I wondered.
Have these architectural feats of language,
these monuments to image, any
lasting foundation other than soft voice?
That’s the question,

I pondered, while breathing deeply on
the white but dirty couch. What if this
coagulation of exasperation, these
swollen metaphors of pain, are merely
dissonant echoes drifting in the void?
I hypothesized,

To peek within,
through artery,
like spying through
a window into a room
with two armchairs
and a book of chemistry.

To capture within
the vaulted length,
the sinuosity of entrails
like a mountain range
that forces trees up toward the sky
with perched birds inside them
looking down toward the earth
for the head of a worm.

To glance within
through dilated ache,
while standing outside a café
in front of a mob that clothe
with invisible meaning
the earth and pretend its
burning bone will survive
the excitement of light
as crystal memory
in the pockets of their hearts.

To visualize within,
through hot telescope,
the distance of our truths,
like studying the clusters
of emptiness inside
an amoeba of hope.

To see within,
through the gate of the mouth,
a deeper hole that is glutted with silence,
like a threshold that opens up
not to soul
but to something even more
lost.

When Midas asked Silenus what fate is best for a man, Silenus answered: “Pitiful race of a day, children of accidents and sorrow, why do you force me to say what were better left unheard! The best of all is unobtainable—not to be born, to be nothing. The second best is to die early.”
– Will Durant (The Story of Philosophy)

Whose torn bolt
was released
on the curvature of time,
who left this mass
of obscurity as a stone
in the sky,

have I begun
to carve enough
misery

from this chunk of night,
or designed
a chorus of smoke.

Its slanting invasion
made us embrace
like twins of twilight
and the irony

of it all
we are abundance
in its thirst,
dancing like swirls
of sweetness in its mouth.

You now
must know
what it is to crave a glass of water
or to sip a kiss;
to be so reckless as to flood
the heart because it is a crater of chalk
and you’re tired of its empty dusty frame.

I don’t remember what
kind of day it was.
Full of sun with
musky winds, dark with
impalpable clouds, perhaps
flat and drunk in sapphire.

I don’t care what kind of day
it was; a day to forget like all
the rest had I not begun to count
the breaths I’ve taken in despair.

I began stooping like an imbecile twig
that bends with every paddle of the wind
as if an essence had broken into milliard
tiny mirrors on the sidewalk, and I had
to count and sew them back into a remembrance.

I plead for the pallid crust of light that envelopes me
like a bulky perfume to melt into a song of shadow
or even for a single mindless mote of dust
to land catastrophically on me and pierce
this ferrous mold, I want to watch my holy skin
fall away and leave a naked and unwashed soul
standing erect like a pagan odalisque.

But don’t show her mercy, kick her out
of this world drama, let her run barefoot
back to her incomprehensible origin.

It could have been a year ago, while getting on
a bus that I conceived of grabbing silence
by its throat and squeezing out a peep;
I had been so innocently prone to believing
that the world was a gigantic bird suffocating
me with its kaleidoscopic feathers but
now I feel at home because suffering
sets as a sun behind the panorama of knowledge
and even if it is reborn every day I dream
at night of being a thin echo of fiction.